Regolith is killing my game

[Crimsontide]

I don't know what to do with all this regolith.  I have autominers/sweepers running it through a cooling loop, so the temps are fine.  I'm just left with so much its killing the game.  I'm up to 5000t and its just climbing...

I can't possibly build enough storage, multiple conveyor lines are completely saturated, the energy used to dig/sweep/cool has far exceeded the power gained from its heat + solar panels under it.  Even melting it still leaves me with 5000t of igneous rock.

WTF are you supposed to do with it?  Who thought this was a good idea?  Seriously this is game-breaking'ly dumb.

[silverbluep]

For casual players, it is something left as a thing to constantly manage manually; issuing dig orders. There are many different methods to automate regolith mining; but many would agree that it not so easy to solve. This i think ties in with the idea that you can't really automate everything. Not only are we missing some key automation detectors (concerning rocket stuff), I don't think the devs rually have the "end game optimize everything" players in mind.
 

There are mods that fix game quirks (like autominers not exchanging heat with adjacent tiles in vacuum) that makes the regolith mining using autominers more intuitive and available. There are also many YouTubers (tonyadvanced did a few videos on this, very cool) that have applied interesting setups that allows to fully mine all the raining regolith. As far as i know, best methods either drip cools miners, or eploits door crushers.

 

Controversial opinion, but I think because of these things that the game is incomplete. Sure it was released, but there are so many bugs and so much content that does not make sense. Mods help with this, but the game still feels unfinished due to all these hard to manage quirks. It makes no sense if machines cannot exchange heat with the tiles they are sitting on for example. You can get away with it in atmosphere, since tile->atmo->machine works well; but space is non-conductive to this. Why include such a mechanic in the space biome then? I don't mean to take the enjoyment out of anyone who is playing, (i actively am not, i am playing other stuff at the moment) i still enjoyed playinh the game but i got tired of keeping track of all these tiny things that break your colony down if you don't play around with them.

 

[speckle21]

It's supposed to free filtration material, so you can use water sieves indefinitely. make unlimited amounts of clay (for making ceramic). And....

... yeah that's about it...

...you're right, it's kinda useless. Seems to be more of a challenge than a resource. Just dump it all into one spot so i doesn't lag the simulation and be done with it. 

[SharraShimada]

You could melt it and dumb the liquid into space. 

[Crimsontide]

I understand heat management in space is hard, TBH I don't even find that to be the issue.  I immersed my miners/sweepers/loaders in molten sulfur (lets almost all light through so it has minimal effect on solar panels, and has the perfect temperature range for regolith).  Its completely automated. 

The problem is the game performance comes screeching to a halt.  I'm getting a slide show on the slowest setting, and I'm running a decent system core i7 6core, 16gig of DDR4, gtx 970, sure its a bit old but was top of the line in its day and still a decent system.  They need to design for the game engine they built, the game just cannot handle the sheer amount of material/automation required...

"You could melt it and dumb the liquid into space. " - Would require far too much energy to melt.  Not to mention the game engine couldn't keep up with the size of the system required to perform such a task.

 

[psusi]

I only build enough bunker doors to operate two space scanners to open and close them and protect the telescope.  Following the example in the thread about the space scanner column, I put two layers of mechanized airlocks on mesh tile to open/close and crush any regolith tiles that fall and push any metal or regolith debris to the side.  Now that I have analyzed all of the destinations on the starmap, I've just locked the doors and don't worry about the meteors.  I just don't worry about the rest of the map.  Rockets destroy any regolith tiles they sit in every time they take off or land, so I don't really need to dig much.  What I do get I just feed to shove voles who make short work of it and provide tons of meat.

 

[Neotuck]

Have you considered Shove Vole ranching?

A single shove vole can eat 5 tons of regolith per cycle

they also drop the max meat of 16,000 kcal  (five times the meat you get from hatches)  making shove voles good critters for mass production of barbeque

[Crimsontide]

I had not considered shove voles...  I will give them a try if possible, performance is getting abysmal.

I still think the whole thing is ridiculous, a small tweak or two could make things far more manageable.  For example (just off the top of my head), instead of 1t per tile of regolith have 200kg per tile (like algae).  That way there's just as much 'mining' and difficulty in handling the stuff but would decrease the volume by 1/5.  They could even bump the SHC from 0.2 to 1 (5x increase) so the amount of heat hasn't changed (though that would mess with regolith boilers).

[Neotuck]

24 minutes ago, Crimsontide said:

I had not considered shove voles...  I will give them a try if possible, performance is getting abysmal.

I did a quick test build transporting all the wild shove voles in a map to this room.  Even with 2 conveyor rails running 24/7 dropping a total of 40kg/s, the wild voles are eating the regolith faster than the chutes can drop them

no need to tame them, just build and forget

[Angpaur]

How do you know it is the regolith which is causing so bad lag for your colony? How much of the asteroid have you mined out?

[psusi]

There was also a build someone posted a while back using robo miners, auto sweepers, and droppers placed carefully so that each auto sweeper can insert into the next dropper, but not pick it back up once it drops it out, forcing it to keep moving to the right.  This was able to move all the regolith in the world unlike rails, which are slow.  I still say the door crusher is best though since it destroys most of the regolith, and requires no power.

[Gurgel]

1 hour ago, psusi said:

I still say the door crusher is best though since it destroys most of the regolith, and requires no power.

Are you sure the door-crusher destroys regolith? As far as I am aware only liquids and gases can be crushed at this time.

[Zarquan]

1 hour ago, Gurgel said:

Are you sure the door-crusher destroys regolith? As far as I am aware only liquids and gases can be crushed at this time.

Regolith tiles can be destroyed through door crushing.  If a door is open, the regolith tiles will fall in to it and when the door closes, it is destroyed.  As far as I know, the debris can not be destroyed in this manner.

4 hours ago, Neotuck said:

I did a quick test build transporting all the wild shove voles in a map to this room.  Even with 2 conveyor rails running 24/7 dropping a total of 40kg/s, the wild voles are eating the regolith faster than the chutes can drop them

no need to tame them, just build and forget

Another idea would be to have unhappy tamed shovels eat all the regolith and don't feed the wild shovels.  This would net you more meat.

[Neotuck]

4 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

Another idea would be to have unhappy tamed shovels eat all the regolith and don't feed the wild shovels.  This would net you more meat.

I thought glum effects metabolism, so wouldn't they eat less? 

[Zarquan]

18 minutes ago, Neotuck said:

I thought glum effects metabolism, so wouldn't they eat less? 

Yes, but that means you get even more meat from the shovels, so I see this as a good thing.

To be precise, a tame glum adult shovel eats on average 1.6 kg/s, and a happy wild shovel eats 2 kg/s.  (according to ONI-DB)

I would like to point out that this idea involves keeping the wild shovels wild and somewhere else where they are left unfed.  Once a wild shovel lays an egg, you catch the critter, tame it, feed it, and keep it happy until you are up to the population you want of tamed unhappy shovels.

If you want to minimize the number of shovels, you still probably want to ranch them, as tamed happy shovels eat 8 kg/s.

[Dosephshih]

I had not tried, but can we melt it to magma, let it cool to form rock, then mine it, half the mass, then melt it again, cool again and mine again.

It should be wasting energy, but sounds funny to me.

May be i will have a try if no one try before?

[psusi]

18 minutes ago, Dosephshih said:

I had not tried, but can we melt it to magma, let it cool to form rock, then mine it, half the mass, then melt it again, cool again and mine again.

It should be wasting energy, but sounds funny to me.

May be i will have a try if no one try before?

That's what you do with shove voles.  They eat regolith debris, then poop a regolith tile with half the mass.  You mine that, it loses half its mass ( again ) and turns into debris, and the shove vole eats it again.  I still haven't figured out at what point they stop pooping half the mass but they must at some point or it would never end.

2 hours ago, Zarquan said:

Regolith tiles can be destroyed through door crushing.  If a door is open, the regolith tiles will fall in to it and when the door closes, it is destroyed.  As far as I know, the debris can not be destroyed in this manner.

Yea, this.  Any regolith smashed to debris already by more meteors gets pushed to the side, but any solid regolith tiles sitting on the bunker doors when they open falls into the mechanized airlocks and is straight up destroyed when they close.

[Neotuck]

2 minutes ago, psusi said:

That's what you do with shove voles.  They eat regolith debris, then poop a regolith tile with half the mass.  You mine that, it loses half its mass ( again ) and turns into debris, and the shove vole eats it again.  I still haven't figured out at what point they stop pooping half the mass but they must at some point or it would never end.

there's a limit on how much kcal worth a critter needs in order to poop, if it doesn't eat enough it simply won't poop and wait till it get's hungry again

[Crimsontide]

10 hours ago, Angpaur said:

How do you know it is the regolith which is causing so bad lag for your colony? How much of the asteroid have you mined out?

Because its only after meteor showers (and particularly iron meteor showers) that it slows to a crawl.  After the regolith is cleared, a save/reload returns frame rates to an acceptable amount.

[Zarquan]

22 minutes ago, Crimsontide said:

Because its only after meteor showers (and particularly iron meteor showers) that it slows to a crawl.  After the regolith is cleared, a save/reload returns frame rates to an acceptable amount.

Could it be because suddenly your sweepers and conveyors are working very hard all of a sudden?  Not actually the regolith itself?  Try turning off your clean-up stuff and see how the game performs.

[Crimsontide]

32 minutes ago, Zarquan said:

Could it be because suddenly your sweepers and conveyors are working very hard all of a sudden?  Not actually the regolith itself?  Try turning off your clean-up stuff and see how the game performs.

I have no doubt that's a big part of it.  There-in lies the problem, the game engine cannot handle the strain when using the very tools given to handle the problem.  Now perhaps conveyor-door setups will auto delete regolith and do it with better performance and no energy cost.  Its just sad that the only real feasible solution currently is an exploit.

[Zarquan]

An alternative idea could be to use storage compactor hopping, where the sweepers sweep directly in to storage containers.  The throughput is a lot higher than conveyors and it probably lags less, though it may use more power depending on how far you are transporting it.

I do wish that extremely complex piping systems and conveyor systems was handled more efficiently.

[SkunkMaster]

Take your rego, combine it with rockets, and you'll have unlimited power.

 

 

[Crimsontide]

But then I'm stuck with 5000t of igneous rock, and back to the same problem of what to do with it.

[goboking]

I'd still like to see a rocket module in which we can store materials to be dumped in space during missions.